Keith Saunders

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Archive for March, 2012

Well here’s something you probably thought you’d never read on my blog — a post about the Brady Bunch. What I can say — its time has come.

I was scanning around the dial on Sunday morning when I came across an obscure cable station running The Brady Bunch. There was nothing else on so I ended up watching most of the show.

In the episode, Marcia, who at that time would have been 15 or 16 years old, has a crush on her dentist, an attractive middle-aged guy who sports a vintage 70s perm.

The dentist asked Marcia if she would like to go to the ballet with him and she accepts, in the process breaking off a date with a friend of her brother’s.

Hilarity ensues as Marcia fantasizes about becoming Mrs Dentist, but she ends up breaking off the date when she learns that he is already married.

As I watched the show I began to have this strange, nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The episode had all of the normal sitcom trappings — the bad jokes, the double entendres, and the pat ending, but something about the plot seemed a little off to me.

All of a sudden it hit me. The moral dilemma was not presented as a middle-aged, married dentist asking a high school student on a date, but rather that Marcia had to break off an already existing date.

Continuing to extrapolate, I have come to the conclusion that in the Brady-universe it would have been OK for Marcia to date a man twenty years or more her senior, providing he was single. Heck, she could date Sam the Butcher, should be ever decide to break it off with Alice.

Get ready for a post that is so deranged it could be harmful to your health. Don’t blame me if you come away from it insisting that America go on the gold standard.

In 1994 Paramount released the first Next Generation Star Trek film, entitled, appropriately enough, Generations. It was a good film, not a great film, but one that I enjoyed when I saw it in its original release, as well in subsequent viewings on cable. It featured the epic meeting between Captains Kirk and Picard, as well as the destruction of the original Enterprise. What’s not to like?

For this post, however, I’m going to focus on a small portion of the film — a five-minute sequence in which Kirk and Picard find themselves marooned in the Nexus; an extra-dimensional realm in which ones thoughts and desires shape reality.

For Picard this meant re-discovering a love interest from his youth whom he had abandoned for the sake of his career. For Kirk it basically boiled down to going horseback riding.

No matter, though, they were happy, at least for five minutes. Once they realized that they had to get back to saving the universe they left the Nexus and returned to reality, or at least what passed for it in the Star Trek universe.

Which brings me to the jazz portion of this post. It is my belief that there exists a jazz nexus. That is to say that there is a zone that can be entered in which the beat becomes wide enough so that the musician possesses unlimited powers. While in the jazz nexus he can do no wrong and so is capable of executing an unlimited amount of ideas with effortless fluidity.

It’s not an easy place to get to. It takes a symbiotic and cohesive unit, as well as a nurturing performance space with a sympathetic audience. It’s not somewhere you can get to on your own. I believe that’s why musicians have chosen this life, which at best is a non-lucrative existence that comes with years of dues paying and struggle.

As for me, I believe that at some point in my youth — I can almost remember the exact night — I stumbled into the nexus and was given a brief glimpse of what it had to offer. Once I had the bug I dedicated my life to trying to get back there.

Musicians such as Wynton Kelley and Hank Mobley lived in the nexus. Mortals such as I are allowed in for a brief taste every so often — long enough to keep me going playing $50.00 gigs secure in the knowledge that I will return.